Play With This Odd Voice Simulator That Mimics How Your Mouth Creates Sound

Most people probably don’t think much about how their mouth works. We learned to make noises and form words so long ago that it seems totally natural to contort your tongue into various positions to make every sound in the language (or languages) you speak. A new online voice emulator simulates how those sounds are actually made.

As Motherboard discovered, Neil Thapen, a mathematician in Prague who also makes video games, designed a web app called Pink Trombone that mimics how your mouth, nasal cavity, and throat work to create speech.

You can control volume and pitch with the voicebox control bar at the bottom, and click on various parts of the mouth to change the sounds the mouth makes. Move the circle within the tongue control around and you’ll hear vowels; experiment with clicking around the palate or the lips and you’ll hear some consonants (mostly some version of “guuuuuuuh”). You can constrict the throat or connect the nasal cavity to the oral cavity for a sing-song tone.

LEGO produces roughly 19 billion elements each year [PDF], and until recently, most of those bricks, minifigures, and accessories were made using oil. Now, the toy company has announced that it's experimenting with more sustainable production methods for certain items. As Mashable reports, the company will start selling 'botanical' pieces made from real plants this year.

To craft the new type of material, LEGO is sourcing sugarcane from Brazil. The crops are grown on agricultural land rather than former rainforests, and the sourcing has received the stamp of approval from the Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance, an organization that encourages corporations to make sustainable, plant-based plastics.

Making LEGO parts from sugarcane results in a softer plastic, so the new method will only be used to make plant pieces like leaves, bushes, and trees for now. The bioplastic botanicals will start appearing in LEGO boxes this year and become standard by the end of 2018.

“The LEGO Group’s decision to pursue sustainably sourced bio-based plastics represents an incredible opportunity to reduce dependence on finite resources," Alix Grabowski, a senior program officer at the World Wildlife Fund, said in a release from LEGO.

Though the switch will reduce the company's carbon footprint, the bioplastic botanicals still only make up of a small fraction of their total product line. LEGO says the change represents one step in its mission to use sustainable materials in core products and packaging by 2030.

You know St. Patrick's Day falls on the 17th of March. And you probably know how many green beers is too many green beers for you to consume. But do you know how many boys born in Ireland are named Patrick each year? Or how many people travel to Ireland to celebrate the holiday each March? The folks at RewardExpert, a website dedicated to helping travelers find the best frequent flyer and travel credit card reward programs for their lifestyle, do. And they've gathered it all together in one handy infographic, just in time for the big day.